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Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 The
Winds of Freedom
And the battle against Islamist terrorism…
[Bruce S. Thornton] 3/10/05
Those of us who enjoy political freedom often take it for granted,
considering it a sort of natural resource that can be simply
handed over to those peoples who lack it. But such freedom had
to be invented in a particular time and place, and then tended,
nurtured, and argued, fought and died for. In order to flourish,
political freedom demands certain kinds of values, certain ways
of looking at the world and regarding human beings, that have
not existed in all times at all places, and so must be borrowed,
learned, practiced, and reinforced. For though the desire for
freedom is natural in every human being, it still has to compete
with other powerful values and goods and needs just as natural
and insistent, such as security or religious meaning or the sheer
power to dominate others.
Yet despite these difficulties, despite the long, slow struggle
of freedom over the centuries, despite all those times it seemed
freedom would wither and die, in the last fifty years we have
witnessed a flowering of political freedom throughout the world,
with the result that now more humans live in free states than
in unfree ones. And just in the last few months, we have seen
the first shoots of freedom breaking through some of the toughest
cultural soil in the world, the Islamic tribal states of the
Middle East. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian Arab territories
people are voting in legitimate elections; in Lebanon throngs
are marching against twenty years of Syrian occupation; in Egypt
a neo-pharaonic Mubarak is compelled to make gestures towards
a legitimate election, and even in feudal Saudi Arabia, at least
men are voting--. What are we to make of these events?
First, we should avoid
premature celebrations, as though the spread of freedom is
a self-generating force that given some
impetus at the right time will continue expanding on its own
energy. The enemies of freedom are legion, and they are motivated
in many cases by powerful human drives as compelling as the desire
to be free. The process started in the Middle East faces resistance
from deep-seated cultural ideals incompatible with political
freedom. Islamic sharia or religious law, for example, in many
cases simply can't coexist intact with notions of individual
freedom and autonomy due to all regardless of sex or religion.
So too with tribal or clan loyalties that value the honor of
the group over the rights of individuals. We would be naïve
to think that freedom expressed in a few elections can automatically
trump these other ancient values deeply ingrained in the culture
of many Islamic societies.
Freedom can, in the
long run, win out, but the struggle will be difficult, marked
by setbacks and violence and a chaos that
will make some long for the days of a tyranny that at least provided
order and security. For the other historical truth about freedom's
progress is that it usually requires the violent repudiation
of those alternatives that conflict with freedom. Consider the
long struggle to liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet domination.
There too, false starts--Hungary in 1956, the "Prague Spring" of
1968--were followed by brutal repression and the contraction
of freedom. Yet the persistence of the West, particularly the
United States, in resisting Soviet expansion, with force when
necessary, and in supporting democratic movements ultimately
paid off with the liberation of those nations and the imploding
of one of the most tyrannous and murderous regimes in history.
Yet that success was
not guaranteed and was long in doubt, for reasons that have
particular relevance for the situation today
in the Middle East. First, a certain kind of political leader
had to arise in the West--a Ronald Reagan or a Margaret Thatcher--who
saw clearly the effort and cost that would have to be paid in
order resist the power of tyranny. These leaders also knew that
force and the threat of force were key to this resistance, and
that negotiation, bartering, dickering, bribing and all the other
diplomatic alternatives eventually would fail without the reality
or threat of force. After all, the Soviet system survived not
just because of oppressive force but because it satisfied some
important human needs----national pride, security, the privilege
and power of the elite and their satellites--even as it failed
to deliver on others such as material comfort, religion, and
freedom. In the case of such powerful incentives, sometimes only
the threat of overwhelming destruction can convince people to
abandon those "goods" that tyranny delivers.
We were fortunate,
then, to have had a President like Ronald Reagan, who increased
military spending, forged ahead with new
military technologies that would give us an overwhelming advantage
over our adversary, sent Pershing missiles to Europe, and most
important, had a moral clarity about the stakes and the costs
of resistance to tyranny, a clarity evident when he called the
Soviet system an "evil empire" or in Berlin dared Gorbachev
to "tear down this wall." Reagan understood that the
desire for freedom is inherent in all humans, but that for freedom
to compete on a level playing field with those other human needs,
all those who held oppressive power by exploiting such needs
had to be made to fear the credible threat of destruction that
would follow their continuing assaults on freedom. For once freedom
has a chance to be exercised, it usually wins in a fair fight.
But remember the resistance
within the West to Reagan's policies--the derision he faced
from the intellectual elite about the "evil
empire" speech, or the massive protests against deploying
the Pershing missiles or against resisting Soviet adventurism
in Central America and Afghanistan--? This brings us to another
powerful impediment to the spread of freedom--the intellectual
and moral pathologies of free Westerners. Taking for granted
the political freedom and material prosperity they enjoyed, many
in the West no longer wanted to pay the price of defending and
advancing freedom.
Some were liberal idealists and pacifists who thought rational
discussion, treaties, summits, bartering, or merely boosting
the esteem of tyrannous states could ultimately prevail without
the bloody, messy, sometimes dirty consequences that always follow
the use of force. Others were leftist ideologues sympathetic
to the values of the enemy, and still others were riddled with
self-doubt about their own societies and the goods they enjoyed,
no longer truly believing that their way of life and their values
were worth killing and dying for.
Whatever the cause, the result was a failure of nerve among
many in the West, one perhaps best epitomized by the U.S. abandonment
of South Vietnam in 1975, thus losing the peace of a war won
by the sacrifice of 60,000 Americans. In short, appeasement of
tyranny rather than resistance characterized the West and emboldened
the Soviet Union, not to mention the Islamists who duplicated
the debacle at the embassy in Saigon with one four years later
at the embassy in Tehran. That the U.S. prevailed in the Cold
War despite the powerful forces of appeasement dominating the
highest cultural and educational levels of our society is astonishing,
and testimony to both the greatness of President Reagan and the
good sense of the American citizens who still knew that in order
to survive and flourish, freedom requires hard, sometimes messy
work and sacrifice.
So too today, the advancement of freedom in the Middle East
has partly been the consequence of a vigorous President who believes
in both the power of freedom and the costs that must be paid
to help freedom flourish, specifically the use of force with
all the unfortunate, unforeseen consequences of violent action.
The success of this progress, however, is in no way assured;
we are now witnessing not the end of tyranny in the Middle East,
but at best the beginning of the end.
Yet that end is not inevitable. Just as during the Cold War,
powerful voices of appeasement continue to criticize and carp
at the President's efforts. Some of this criticism is, of course,
partisan sour grapes on the part of some Democrats and their
minions in the media, who so far have been proven wrong in all
their dire prophecies, from the astronomical casualties they
predicted at the start of combat operations in Afghanistan and
Iraq, to the warnings that elections in Iraq would fail in an
orgy of insurgent violence. Faced with the President's success,
these critics have fallen back onto the same lame rationalizations
used to discredit Ronald Reagan's achievement of kicking the
last props out from under Soviet tyranny.
Yes, they admit, elections
are being held, Libya has abandoned its weapons of mass destruction,
Lebanese are marching in the
streets, the Palestinians have held their first legitimate election;
and yes, the overthrow of tyrannies in Afghanistan and Iraq and
the televised images of Iraqi and Afghan women voting have contributed
to this movement, but it was all done "badly," these
critics complain----as though there were some easy, cost-free
recipe for simultaneously overthrowing two murderous tyrannies
and bringing democracy to peoples who had never known it. Or
the critics assert that the forces of democracy were already
in motion and so all these events would have taken place without
the invasion of Iraq--a counterfactual impossible, of course,
to ever test, and redolent of those who refused to give Reagan
credit for the demise of the Soviet Union. Blinded by partisan
Bushopobia, these critics simply cannot admit that they were
wrong and that one of the great liberal Democratic Party ideals,
the spread of democracy and freedom, has been advanced by a Republican.
Given the nature of democratic politics and the election cycle,
these voices of partisan criticism represent a very real threat
to the continuity necessary for this effort to succeed. Countering
that criticism with facts and argument will be a necessary part
of that effort. Equally dangerous is the self-doubt about liberal
democracy and free-market economies that drives the global protest
network, that congeries of starry-eyed environmentalists, old-line
communists, half-wit movie stars, neo-hippie college students,
and all those other Westerners who cocooned in luxury entertain
fantasies of utopian perfection. Their impatience with the cost
of protecting and advancing the ideals from which they benefit
could easily spread, particularly given the setbacks sure to
come in the years ahead, and such widespread discontent could
return us again to the timidity and doubt that characterized
the seventies.
True, nothing like the nuclear-armed Soviet military behemoth
of those years exists to resist our efforts, yet in many ways
Islamist terrorism is more difficult and insidious than was the
Soviet Union, whose jaded ruling elite were motivated by material
benefits and power, and so in the end could be swayed by a material
calculus. The Islamists, on the other hand, are driven by a vision
of ultimate spiritual reality, one so powerful that it justifies
the slaughter of innocents. In this they resemble more the Japanese
imperial militarists or the Nazis, true believers that only utter
and complete destruction could disabuse of their beliefs. The
battle against Islamist terrorism, then, will require even more
commitment over a longer span of time than the struggle against
Soviet communism did. Time will tell whether our democratic politics
is compatible with such a lengthy commitment.
Now is not the time to celebrate, then. The struggle has just
begun, and the years ahead will be marked by setbacks, mistakes,
and at times bloody chaos. Whether we will succeed or not--that
is, whether freedom wins out or not-- is still an open question,
as it has always been. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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